Do the Right Thing: A Film by Spike Lee
Patrick Hyland “Those who tell don’t know, and those who know don’t tell.” -Da Mayor Racism. It’s what’s for breakfast. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was intended as polemic, an aggressive assertion on race relations in the last 25 years of the twentieth century, told from the perspective of Mookie, a well loved figure in 1989 Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He is a member of the black majority that floods the streets on this, the hottest day of summer. Lee’s brutally honest portrayal of society’s un-discussed secret is augmented fully by the bold cinematography of frequent collaborator Ernest Dickerson. On top of this is a solid cast featuring everyone’s favorite couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, the boxing/fighting/dancing of Rosie Perez, some fine white-bread nonsense from John Turturro and Danny Aiello, and Mr. Lee himself.
The Story Of Life Is This...
So here we are: 1989, the number, another summer, the sound of tha funkee drummer. Mookie, our boy, is off to Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, his place of employment. On the way we meet Jade, his sister (Joie Lee), Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), Da Mayor (lovable Bed-Stuy skell, portrayed by the impeccable Ossie Davis), and Senor Love Daddy (Greek chorus style Disc Jockey, Samuel L. Jackson). Once inside we also come across Vito, Pino, and Sal, the dynasty of Sal’s Famous. Vito is a chill man of the ages, not hung up on race, a man’s man, innocent. He and Mookie commiserate over their work and converse playfully on baseball stats and their correlation to ethnicity. His brother Pino, on the other hand, is a real prick. Always armed with a racist quip, though not always used maliciously. Tensions between Pino and Mookie are clearly high, but they coexist reluctantly. Finally Sal, father, pizza-slinging patriarch of the enterprise, is another man’s man. He busts Mookie’s chops (rightfully so seeing as, despite his endearing qualities, Mookie is not the best delivery boy one could ask for) but ultimately respects him, and thinks of him as a son.
So our day continues as Mookie delivers pizza, the boys bicker, Buggin’ Out bugs out and so on and so forth. Let me elaborate on that last bit: our hyped up compadre Buggin’ Out is eating in Sal’s and notices that Sal’s so called “Wall of Fame” is comprised entirely of gentlemen of the Caucasian persuasion. So he protests to Sal, who retorts that when Buggin’ Out owns his own pizzeria, he can put whoever the hell he wants on the wall. So Buggin’ Out tries to ignite a boycott of Sal’s Famous, which is met with mixed reviews, the general consensus being that Sal’s is a neighborhood institution, as Jade says, “I was raised on Sal’s pizza”, and who gives a fiddler’s fart if he has Frank Sinatra or Malcolm X on the wall? Throughout this, we see small quarrels betwixt the black Radio Raheem (who does not speak but is at all times carrying a ghetto blaster blaring Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”) and the neighborhood Hispanics and Korean grocers. We see the square white cops bust the balls of some brothers who opened up a fire
Some Might Even Say 'Yo! Shorty Black, Ya Buggin' Out'
hydrant on the hottest day of the year. All the while, racial tensions are running high. Make a long story short, this climaxes in the black population pillaging and burning Sal’s Pizzeria for forcing Raheem to turn off his radio. This occurs, tragically, right after Sal has privately delivered a monologue to Mookie and his sons about how he is not racist, how Mookie is like a third son to him, and his hopes for everyone to just get along. So this makes it all the more difficult to watch as his supposedly racist establishment is torn to the ground. But as the police intervene in the commotion they end up killing Radio Raheem, causing the rebellion to burn on further.
But now to the importance. The right thing. What the hell is it? Was it done by the characters in this movie? I think most would say no. The looters who destroy Sal’s, who earlier in the movie, claimed to love as a family institution, have no loyalty. They turned on Sal as soon as the heat got up and someone threw a trashcan through the window. Complete communication breakdown! No one in this movie acknowledges the real source of their anger, which this young white viewer from Mayberry presumes to be the subtle conditioning of modern institutional racism. And in the end, everyone gets hurt.
The motifs and tensions in this movie are amplified by Dickerson’s genius camera work, featuring an abundance of “Dutch Angles” and hand-held moving shots which give the viewer the feeling of being a member of the discussions of the film. And the golden dawn, the moment of self-actualization, the heart-breaking high water mark of the film, is Radio Raheem s monologue on Love and Hate, and their conflicting nature. In the end, he says, Hate gets knocked out, KO’d by Love. In the film we see that “Hate is kickin’ much ass” as Sal is forced to watch his livelihood which he spent years building be destroyed in minutes and the police strangle Radio Raheem. But the next day, when Mookie returns to Sal’s Famous and reconciles (somewhat) with Sal, we see that hate may (possibly) have been KO’d by Love.
...and that's the DOUBLE truth, Ruth!
The uproar that he film caused begs for pages and pages of analysis, but really you need to see it, and decide for yourself what the right thing is. Because I believe the point of the film is that, in the matter of race, the right thing is always open to interpretation. The right thing is simply the peaceful coexisting path of least resistance that rings in the brotherhood of man, where Chuck D. and Ronald Regan could someday play shuffle board together. So in the interim, just remember: always do the right thing.
Patrick Hyland
“Those who tell don’t know, and those who know don’t tell.”
-Da Mayor
Racism. It’s what’s for breakfast. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was intended as polemic, an aggressive assertion on race relations in the last 25 years of the twentieth century, told from the perspective of Mookie, a well loved figure in 1989 Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He is a member of the black majority that floods the streets on this, the hottest day of summer. Lee’s brutally honest portrayal of society’s un-discussed secret is augmented fully by the bold cinematography of frequent collaborator Ernest Dickerson. On top of this is a solid cast featuring everyone’s favorite couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, the boxing/fighting/dancing of Rosie Perez, some fine white-bread nonsense from John Turturro and Danny Aiello, and Mr. Lee himself.
So here we are: 1989, the number, another summer, the sound of tha funkee drummer. Mookie, our boy, is off to Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, his place of employment. On the way we meet Jade, his sister (Joie Lee), Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), Da Mayor (lovable Bed-Stuy skell, portrayed by the impeccable Ossie Davis), and Senor Love Daddy (Greek chorus style Disc Jockey, Samuel L. Jackson). Once inside we also come across Vito, Pino, and Sal, the dynasty of Sal’s Famous. Vito is a chill man of the ages, not hung up on race, a man’s man, innocent. He and Mookie commiserate over their work and converse playfully on baseball stats and their correlation to ethnicity. His brother Pino, on the other hand, is a real prick. Always armed with a racist quip, though not always used maliciously. Tensions between Pino and Mookie are clearly high, but they coexist reluctantly. Finally Sal, father, pizza-slinging patriarch of the enterprise, is another man’s man. He busts Mookie’s chops (rightfully so seeing as, despite his endearing qualities, Mookie is not the best delivery boy one could ask for) but ultimately respects him, and thinks of him as a son.
So our day continues as Mookie delivers pizza, the boys bicker, Buggin’ Out bugs out and so on and so forth. Let me elaborate on that last bit: our hyped up compadre Buggin’ Out is eating in Sal’s and notices that Sal’s so called “Wall of Fame” is comprised entirely of gentlemen of the Caucasian persuasion. So he protests to Sal, who retorts that when Buggin’ Out owns his own pizzeria, he can put whoever the hell he wants on the wall. So Buggin’ Out tries to ignite a boycott of Sal’s Famous, which is met with mixed reviews, the general consensus being that Sal’s is a neighborhood institution, as Jade says, “I was raised on Sal’s pizza”, and who gives a fiddler’s fart if he has Frank Sinatra or Malcolm X on the wall? Throughout this, we see small quarrels betwixt the black Radio Raheem (who does not speak but is at all times carrying a ghetto blaster blaring Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”) and the neighborhood Hispanics and Korean grocers. We see the square white cops bust the balls of some brothers who opened up a fire
But now to the importance. The right thing. What the hell is it? Was it done by the characters in this movie? I think most would say no. The looters who destroy Sal’s, who earlier in the movie, claimed to love as a family institution, have no loyalty. They turned on Sal as soon as the heat got up and someone threw a trashcan through the window. Complete communication breakdown! No one in this movie acknowledges the real source of their anger, which this young white viewer from Mayberry presumes to be the subtle conditioning of modern institutional racism. And in the end, everyone gets hurt.
The motifs and tensions in this movie are amplified by Dickerson’s genius camera work, featuring an abundance of “Dutch Angles” and hand-held moving shots which give the viewer the feeling of being a member of the discussions of the film. And the golden dawn, the moment of self-actualization, the heart-breaking high water mark of the film, is Radio Raheem s monologue on Love and Hate, and their conflicting nature. In the end, he says, Hate gets knocked out, KO’d by Love. In the film we see that “Hate is kickin’ much ass” as Sal is forced to watch his livelihood which he spent years building be destroyed in minutes and the police strangle Radio Raheem. But the next day, when Mookie returns to Sal’s Famous and reconciles (somewhat) with Sal, we see that hate may (possibly) have been KO’d by Love.
The uproar that he film caused begs for pages and pages of analysis, but really you need to see it, and decide for yourself what the right thing is. Because I believe the point of the film is that, in the matter of race, the right thing is always open to interpretation. The right thing is simply the peaceful coexisting path of least resistance that rings in the brotherhood of man, where Chuck D. and Ronald Regan could someday play shuffle board together. So in the interim, just remember: always do the right thing.